Sky Guys to develop drone for Ont. highway monitoring

November 20, 2017

By Staff

The Sky Guys have teamed up with NVIDIA, IBM and the University of Toronto to be awarded $750,000, from Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), as part of the Small Business Innovation Challenge (SBIC). The group will work closely with the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) to develop an artificial intelligence-enabled drone solution to monitor Ontario’s 400-series highways in response to the Vehicle Occupancy Detection Problem Statement.

The application, titled “Long-Range AI-Enabled Unmanned Aerial System for Highway Traffic Enforcement with Future Road Applications,” was selected and funding will be administered by OCE on behalf of the Ontario government over the next two years while The Sky Guys, NVIDIA, IBM, and U of T work with the ministry on this project.

“This is very exciting for us,” said Adam Sax, president and CEO of The Sky Guys. “Ontario is the hub of innovation in Canada, so we are very honoured to be selected for this amazing project.”

The project will test the drones for highway enforcement and management, beginning with the High-Occupancy Vehicle/High-Occupancy Toll (HOV/HOT) lanes.

“The Sky Guys are leveraging the latest advances in aircraft controls, AI, and cloud security to offer a safe, privacy-protected, and reliable package for billing and enforcing HOV/HOT lanes,” said Angela Schoellig, a professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“And this is just the beginning. In the future, our system will evolve to address additional challenges, from tracking road defects to correlating highway contractor choice to the quality of roads they maintain,” added Jeremy Wang, CTO of The Sky Guys.